December 19, 2016 - NASA's Next Spacecraft

NASA’s Next Spacecraft Orion is NASA’s next-generation human spaceflight vehicle, built by Lockheed Martin to allow astronauts to soon travel farther than ever before: beyond low-Earth orbit, back to the Moon, to an asteroid, and one day to Mars. Orion’s first flight, EFT-1, occurred on December 5, 2014. An uncrewed and pared-down version of the vehicle was launched into a single orbit 5,800 km (3,600 mi) above Earth to test the flight, reentry, and splashdown capabilities of the spacecraft. The data gathered during the successful EFT-1 flight is being used to perfect the design of Orion and make sure that it is ready for future long-term deep-space missions by human explorers. Orion’s next launch, Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1), will be an uncrewed flight in 2018 aboard NASA’s new SLS rocket.